In Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain” (number 341 in Thomas H. Johnson's Complete Poems), the speaker dramatizes the agony of experiencing grief. She does not identify the cause of the any particular “pain,” because it is only the effect she is exploring; so whether the individual is suffering because of the loss of a loved one to death or the break up of a friendship, or even the tragedy of suffering a debilitating illness, only the suffering itself remains the focus.
The poem is structured in three stanzas; the first and third are quatrains, and the middle stanza is a cinquain. The poem is a masterful dramatization, set in stone as a sculpture; it stands testimony to Dickinson’s greatness, not only as artist but also as a psychologist.
First Stanza: “After great pain, a formal feeling comes”
The speaker announces, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” This simple claim puts a name to the stunned feeling that accompanies the sudden onset of grief that results from having experienced “great pain.” The feeling is “formal.”
The opposite feeling then would be “informal,” which the individual suspended in contentedness or even neutrality of emotion would be experiencing. The ordinary unsuffering consciousness has no particular form; it is spread out over the heart and mind, formless, shapeless, and unrecognizable until prodded.
But once the suffering begins, the consciousness becomes aware of itself and notes that the feeling causes stiffness, hardness, and coldness as the “Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.”
Time becomes a loose construction, and the sufferer feels that she might have been suffering for centuries. The heart personified “questions was it He, that bore, / And Yesterday, or Centuries before?” That “stiff” heart can no longer distinguish days from years.
Second Stanza: “The Feet, mechanical, go round”
The sufferer seems to go through her days like an automaton. The formal stiffness expands from the heart to the feet that “mechanical, go round.” As the cliché puts it, she just “goes through the motions” of living, “A Wooden way / Regardless grown, / A Quartz contentment, like a stone.” The image of hard, stiff formality becomes the stone on which the suffering individual tries to carve out her life.
Third Stanza: “This is the Hour of Lead”
The suffering that has effected the hard, stiff formality has transformed into an “Hour of Lead.” Time becomes a leaden sea upon which the navigator has great difficulty moving forward.
The speaker then concludes that if the sufferer can just live through the great pain that has nearly stopped her life, she will remember the experience as “Freezing persons, recollect the Snow — /
First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go.”
While still in the throes of such “great pain,” the sufferer will not be sure she can outlive the event, but if she does, according to the speaker, she will be able to look back and think of the pain as a cold, blank substance that stiffened her until she finally was able to lose the consciousness that held that intolerable anguish.
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